A controversial police investigation into suspected sex abuse of children by the late British prime minister Edward Heath, with related claims of Satanic rituals and murders, originated in Edmonton in 1989, when a Canadian psychologist hypnotized a woman and helped her “recover” suppressed memories, according to a confidential police consultant report obtained by the National Post.

Cheryl Malmo, an Edmonton psychologist who retired in 2016, hypnotized a woman to treat her for depression, which she suspected was related to abuse from her childhood in Wiltshire, England, according to the report. What followed was a litany of horrific tales, seeping slowly from the woman’s memory, growing in lurid detail over time, “guided and influenced” by Malmo’s hypnotherapy, according to the consultant criminologist.

…They include stories of helping her mother kidnap a boy, who was raped by her father on a church altar, then suspended from a rope, as the woman’s mother cut his penis with a knife and drained his blood into a gleaming metal bucket. After apparently suppressing these memories all her adult life, the woman, then in her late 40s, told stories of rape, candlelit black magic rituals, cannibalism, child murder and bestiality — stories that were initially about her parents, but in time grew to include one of the most powerful men in the world.

The “confidential police consultant report” was by Dr Rachel Hoskins, and the fact that the National Post has a copy is less of a sensation when it is noted that the same report formed the basis for a front-page splash that appeared in the Mail on Sunday in November, under the headline “Heath Accuser ‘Is a Satanic Sex Fantasist'”. Hoskins went public due to concerns about the direction of the police investigation. I discussed the background here.

The late Ted Heath was only added to the abuse story years after the accuser’s association with Malmo:

The case was resurrected only in the last year or so, with the added detail of Heath’s alleged participation in some of the abuse, but not the Satanic rituals. One sister told police she had seen his face on the news and “trusted my gut.”

Heath was on the news at that time because other individuals had accused him of child sex abuse (discussed by me here), and the police had decided to launch an investigation with a dramatic announcement outside Heath’s former home in Salisbury in August 2015.

Hoskins referred to the therapist as “Fiona”, and claimed that she had been mentored by none other than Lawrence Pazder, author of the infamous hoax Michelle Remembers. However, it’s not clear where Hoskins got this detail from, and there is no link between Malmo and Pazder that I can see. Malmo maintains in the National Post that “solid research and sound critique by many experts” has “disposed” of the idea of false memories.

Malmo and “Valerie”

After the National Post article was published, I sent off for a copy of Malmo’s 1990 book Healing Voices: Feminist Approaches to Therapy with Women, which she co-wrote with Toni Ann Laidlaw and other associates (published by Jossey-Bass of San Francisco; the authors each wrote their own chapters). The book includes Malmo’s account of working with a patient called “Valerie” (pages 308-311), which Malmo wrote up as a case of “dissociation for survival”.

Valerie was middle-aged and suffering from marital problems, and she “wondered whether her having been sexually abused by her father, about which she had no feelings, could be a factor in her difficulties.” Malmo told her that this “undoubtedly” was a factor, and the subsequent therapy included hypnosis:

Over a period of eighteen months, [Valerie] uncovered numerous memories of having been sexually, physically, and psychologically abused by her father and physically and psychologically abused by her mother as well.

…One day Valerie brought into her therapy session some postcards, a Bible, and a prayer book on which were inscribed messages to her from her father. Valerie and I both perceived that in all of the messages there was the facade of a loving relationship making an undercurrent of threats, seduction, anger, guilt, and hypocrisy…

In a later session, Valerie had an image in her mind of her father making someone called “Karen” pose for pornographic photographs. She eventually realised that this “Karen” was the part of herself who had been sexually abused but ignored.

At length, she also came to “remember” Satanism:

Early in therapy, I taught Valerie to image [sic] a safe place… and a spirit guide to assist her to feel safe. Valerie found a sense of peace and calm when she sat by (or imagined sitting by) a window where the light or sun was streaming in. In the beginning. we did not know the significance of this safe place. The full meaning emerged months later, when Valerie began uncovering extreme abuse in a satanic cult in which her father and mother were high priest and priestess. Valerie was compelled to partake in sexual activities and in animal and human mutilations and sacrifices. She realized that the sunlight felt calming to her because the morning marked the end of the ritual abuse, which took place at night.

Eventually, Malmo used hypnotism to lead Valerie into an imaginative exercise in which her father presented himself as “a man in a yellowish-brown monster suit with a mask and tail, a lionlike devil performing in some sort of ritual.” In the exercise, Valerie stood up to the monster, cut off its tail, hit her mother with it, and told the other participants to “Go home”.

This is exactly the same progress as described in the National Post report: “a litany of horrific tales, seeping slowly from the woman’s memory, growing in lurid detail over time, ‘guided and influenced’ by Malmo’s hypnotherapy.”

Taking Malmo’s account of Valerie at face value, we see a progression from the plausible (abuse by the father – building on a memory that the patient had before starting therapy) to the implausible (a murderous satanic cult) to the explicitly fantastical (the father as a literal monster). Where exactly along this scale did imagination displace memory? It seems to me that Valerie’s disgust at her father’s alleged hypocrisy over the Bible and Prayer Book might well have made her – and/or Malmo – susceptible to imagining the father in a role where he would be exposed as embodying a thoroughgoing inversion of Christianity: as the high priest (and not just a member!) of a satanic cult.

Valerie appears to be distinct from the Heath accuser (given the name “Lucy” in the Mail on Sunday) . Thus Malmo on at least two occasions found herself dealing with a patient who ended up “remembering” Satanic murders. One wonders how many others there were, and whether she ever started to wonder about the likelihood of coming across multiple instances of such bizarre and extreme crimes.

2 Responses

An excellent blog Richard.
History repeats itself.
Ad infinitum, it would seem!
I draw your readers attention to this SAFF report related to the recent false VIP allegations against Proctor, Heath and others:

“Here’s the Proof that the Westminster VIP Paedophile Myth and the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth are one in the same: We expose the network of Agents of Influence who have promoted these child-abuse scares since 1988

The SAFF covered the birth of the Westminster VIP Paedophile Myth when it happened in 1993 and in particular we spelled-out its development and inevitable damage here http://saff.nfshost.com/colemanrains.htm … . Look at the document reproduced at the foot of that web-page,

It will prove beyond doubt that the same people who pushed the Satanic Ritual Child Abuse nonsense in the 1990s, mainly radical feminist therapists, are a major cause of the Westminster VIP paedophile Ring Myth today.

The RAINS SRA VIP Suspects List:

If you check out that link you will see at the bottom of the page a ‘RAINS Satanic Abuse VIP Suspects List’ compiled as early as 1997 which includes a whole tranche of VIPs and Aristocratic names, along with a smattering of Celebrities who, long before the Savile scare had manifested, were being entrained for ‘the treatment’ whenever some indoctrinated victim imposter could be brainwashed into accusing them by Satan hunter therapists who should have been sacked and professionally discredited 27 years ago. Ted Heath is falsely accused in that document which was passed to therapists who believed in SRA across the Western world. It was only a matter of time before the radfem self-reinforcing prophecy became ‘unfact’.

RAINS is a pressure group set up in 1988 by key figures in the child-scare-industry who created the 1990 SRA panic. It’s full title is Ritual Abuse Information Network & Support and it’s intended plan was to form an association of believers in SRA, including both victims and professionals, to campaign behind the scenes in a ‘long-march’ through social work, government, the police and the therapy industry to establish SRA as a world-wide threat to children.

They did this by publishing books, holding Satan Seminars, and moulding the training of social workers and police towards the idea of SRA. It worked. In 2004 one of their number held Satan Seminars to indoctrinate the Met police child abuse team run by Peter Spindler, later head of Yewtree.

The people involved in RAINS run across the gamut of child-care. Social Workers, Therapists, Solicitors, Barristers, Doctors, Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Child-Welfare experts, Academics, and many Media people. Some of the key supporters who have been most active in the promotion of the Westminster VIP Paedophile Ring Myth and which we will speak of here are Joan Coleman, Valerie Sinason (see her involvement in Savile here), Sarah Nelson, Beatrix Campbell and Tim Tate. Like the religious fundamentalists they often work with, these people obviously sincerely believe that they are campaigning to help stop the suffering of children but they are chasing a phantom of their own making and will not let it go regardless of the damage it is doing to innocents. ”

This is just a mediaeval which-hunt created by the demonology of the ‘ultimate male rapist’ invented and promulgated by extreme radical feminists since the 1970s to justify the gradual destruction of the power-bases of patriarchalism. The same improperganda was used to try to discredit and destroy Donald Trump. They pushed so hard that they broke the bubble with a groundswell of non-PC rightists taking back control. We must all now suffer the consequences of a lurch to the patriarchal right due to a fantastical monster of the feminists own making.

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Note on Attacks

Anyone who comments on current affairs on-line risks being smeared by attack sites and/or abusive Tweets. This is particularly so if one chooses to challenge dishonesty or other kinds of reprehensible behaviour.

As a result of making a stand in a few particular instances, I have become the focus of a number of such attacks. Those who have targeted me include: a Nigerian evangelist who believes in "child witches"; former activists with the EDL; a man with a long history of bad debt and grandiosity; a sockpuppeting tabloid journalist; and a self-serving "celebrity" MP who deploys smears to discourage scrutiny.

The bad faith of such sites and Tweets ought to be self-evident. However, any readers interested in the true background can read this and this.